Tiruray-English Lexicon

INTRODUCTION

The Tiruray^ are a Philippine hill people, who inhabit the northern
part of the Cotabato Cordillera, a range of rugged, low mountains which
arcs along the southwestern coast of Mindanao facing the Celebes Sea.
The Tiruray homeland, approximately 3,000 square kilometers in area,
is located entirely within Cotabato, the largest of the Philippines' fifty-
six provinces; it is bounded on the west by the Celebes Sea, on the north
and northeast by the end of the mountains, on the southeast by the Maga-
noy River, and on the south by the lower Tran Grande River where, be-
fore rising sharply southward, it winds almost due west to the sea.

The 1960 census^ reported 26,344 Tiruray native speakers, the vast
majority of whom reside in the traditional Tiruray area, although a few
have dispersed since the end of World War II and are homesteading
either in the Cotabato lowlands or in the land of the CAtabato Manobo in
the mountains to the south.

Traditionally, Tiruray lived in dispersed hamlets of some three to
eight families, several such settlements cooperating in shifting cultivation
activities and thus forming uncentralized neighborhoods. In addition to
their slash-and-burn farming of the mountain forests, Tiruray engage in
extensive hunting, fishing, and gathering of wild foods and materials. They
neither weave nor smith, obtaining cloth and iron tools, as well as salt
and such exchange goods as bead necklaces and brass betel quid boxes,
from the Maguindanao Moslems of the surrounding lowlands, in trade for
rattan and other valued forest goods. ^

Leadership is informal and of two principal types: religious and legal."*
The society is bilaterally organized, and the kinship terminology sets off
the members of one's nuclear families of orientation and procreation
from all others in one's personal kindred, the latter being distinguished
by generation but not descent. The kindred extends laterally to include
all second cousins, and does not include any affines.

Late in the nineteenth century, the Spanish were able to defeat the
Maguindanao sufficiently to establish a garrison in Cotabato City and a
Jesuit mission, which included a school for Tiruray, in the Tamantaka
area, at the foot of what they called the "Tiruray Mountains" near Awang.s
Spanish presence was relatively short-lived, and it was during the time
of American occupation early in the twentieth century that the Tiruray
mountain homeland was first opened to significant outside influences.
Schools were established in the area between Awang and Nuro, roads built
connecting Nuro with Awang and thus with Cotabato City, Christian mis-
sions founded, and significant immigration was begun by homesteading

^"Tiruray" (sometimes "Tirurai") is the conventional English spelling; the
people refer to themselves and their language as teduray.

^Republic of the Philippines, Department of Commerce and Industry, Bureau
of the Census and Statistics (1962).

^The author is currently preparing for publication a detailed account of
Tiruray subsistence patterns.

*See Schlegel (1970).

ssaleeby (1905:15).

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4 Timray 'English Lexicon

Christian Filipino lowlanders. Many of the Tiruray in this northernmost
half of their traditional area were persuaded to turn from shifting culti-
vation to sedentary plow farming, a transition which was encouraged by
an agricultural school established just north of Nuro, and by pressures
exerted by the American municipal authorities to register and title land.
Many Tiruray, however, retreated from the new people and new ways of
the area, and sought refuge for their traditional way of life in the more
interior areas of the mountains to the south.

Most isolated and traditional Tiruray are monolingual, speaking only
their own Tiruray vernacular, although many men and some women have
a superficial knowledge of Maguindanao, sufficient for trade purpo^s in
Maguindanao markets, where Tiruray is not used. The more acculturated
people in the northern section have learned Tagalog, which is used among
the various homesteader groups, and many have learned English, which
with Tagalog is the language of instruction in the schools. These linguistic
associations have resulted in a large number of foreigh loan words, mostly
Spanish and Maguindanao, being introduced into common Tiruray vernacu-
lar usage.

The Tiruray language is not mutually intelligible with those of the
neighboring tribal or peasant groups, but is structurally very similar to
them and to the other Philippine languages of the Mai ayo- Polynesian
(Austronesian) linguistic family.^

Wherever possible, word bases have been entered in this lexicon along
with common or unpredictable derivatives, which are entered with their
meaning under the base from which they are derived and are also cross-
entered alphabetically. The over 6,000 entries represent some 50,000
recorded forms, which were reduced by morphological analysis to the
present entries. Personal names and place names have not been included
m the lexicon; of the several thousand recorded, a sample of both cate-
gories is included in an appendix.

The grammar of Tiruray has not been fully worked out. Preliminary
analysis, however, is reflected in the English glossing of the entries,
which have been cast in verbal, nominal, adjectival, adverbial, etc., form
consistent with their general Tiruray usage.

I lived among Tiruray from 1960 to 1963, when I was principal of a
high school in Nuro. During that time some formal attention was devoted
to the Tiruray lartguage, but most of the data presented in this lexicon
were recorded during 1966-67, when I returned to conduct anthropological
field study of the traditional Tiruray legal system. The greater part of
this research was done in an isolated community, Figel, well up the Tran
Grande River, though significant periods of time were spent in Kabakaba
(m the heavily acculturated area), and in Ranao (a transitional community
on the fringe of significant external influences). On the whole, very little
dialectal diversity was observed throughout the Tiruray linguistic region.
Some minor differences exist in intonation, a few lexical items are more
associated with one area than another, and the incidence of loan words
m regular use varies according to the relative degree of isolation. No
instance was observed or reported, however, of less than total mutual
intelligibility among all Tiruray.

Schlegel, Stuart. 1971. Tiruray-EngHsh Lexicon.
Berkeley: University of California Press.